Paratheses

Maria Vlandi

11 May 2023 - 24 June 2023 Athens CURATED BY Maria Almpani TEXT BY Yiorgos Tsirigotakis TRANSLATION BY Yota Dimitriou PARTICIPANTS Maria Vlandi

Paratheses I,
ceramic sculpture,
182 x 120 x 42 cm,
2022-2023

The ALMA Gallery invites you on Thursday, May 11 to the official opening of the PARATHESES exhibition of sculpture by Maria Vlandi. The artist presents works as the outcome of seven years of a creatively exploratory endeavour, which show clearly the universal elements of the characteristic morphology in her art of recent years. She continues to build non-uniform modular elements of clay which she combines to create large, solid works with structure as the most prominent aspect, at the same time seeking ways out of the confines of a wholly formalist proposition. She retrieves fragments from within—sometimes from memory, sometimes out of instinct— which she recomposes into a new structure. One feels that she subjects her image to a system of justice which she is anxious to impose, via a host of contradictory elements, as part of her own order of things. The balance between an alternating conceptual ambivalence and material correspondence emerges as an objective of fundamental significance in her work. Each element in her compositions is defined through a dialogue with its opposite. This is especially evident in the second sculpture of the series, in which Vlandi boldly attempts , by placing small fragments of matter at the top and thus completing and at the same time impeding the dynamic of a voluminous rise, to impose a harmony of the different.

Maria Vlandi assumes a clear stance, drawing from the past while standing on the present, to expand her quests and give us a new aesthetic identity as an expression of a contemporary ceramic experience.